Augmented Reality Plane Finder Trumps Charts

Pinkfroot is a small iOS dev shop in the UK who specializes on apps that show planes and ships on maps. I had the author Lee Armstrong on my podcast a while back explaining how they are getting the vehicle telemetry. Increasing numbers of airlines and ships are outfitting their vehicles with transponders that are transmitting data like current speed or destination and there are boatloads of volunteers worldwide who have receivers for these airwaves and share them with Pinkfroot.

They had already used my DTAugmentedRealityController part with a bit of success on a Shipfinder app Ships Ahoy!, but naturally this is only interesting for people who at least sometimes have water nearby to gaze at ships on. Most of us iPhone users are living inland and so for every ship we see, there are dozens of planes that pass over our heads.

Enter Plane Finder AR. For the first time there is an Augmented Reality app where it actually makes sense to point your iPhone at something and get augmented data for what you are looking at. Granted there are apps showing you names of mountain peaks, but – honestly – those don’t move so much and thus are way less interesting as something that happens to pass over you right now.

Plane Finder AR gives you a rotating mini map and labels for the individual planes. These tell you the designations of the planes, ground speed, altitude, origin and destination, and distance from you. It proves to be a great use case for my AR component. If you have the data (the more live the better) you can easily build an enticing app.

Just how enticing? Well, let’s check the charts (courtesy of Applyzer)

The audience is downloading this app more than the likes of Tom Tom or CoPilot who had been leading the Navigation Category. Which in my humble opinion makes perfect sense because while navigation is something that you might use every once in a while when driving somewhere, this app makes the air above your current location a more interesting place.